The Things You Care About Break Your Heart—Do Them Anyways
The most important lesson from the new RAFA documentary
The “RAFA” documentary speaks to something in all of us: it’s riveting when you have the guts to step into the arena, risk failure, and give something your all, even if you know you’re going to leave it behind.
Rafael Nadal loved to win, but what he really loved was the feeling of pushing against meaningful struggle.
He loved the grind.
He loved the process.
He loved exploring his limits.
“Victory lasts only so long; it’s momentary,” says Nadal. “What has always motivated me is the desire to keep fighting, because satisfaction comes from difficulty.”
I watched the RAFA documentary with my 8-year-old son and there were so many incredible lessons not just about playing good tennis but about living a good life.
If you find something in your life that allows you to push against and overcome difficulty, yes, it can make life harder, but it also makes life so much richer.
You have to risk something. You have to be willing to get your heart broken. You have to surround yourself with a support system.
When you pour your all into something—a sport, a craft, a relationship, a team—it becomes a part of who you are. The sadness you experience when you leave it behind is the price you pay for having the experience.
There’s an old saying: Athletes die twice—once when they die and once when they retire. But it’s not just for athletes, it’s for anyone who loves their craft. It’s for parents whose kids will eventually move out of the house. It’s for couples who likely won’t die at the exact same time.
Passion comes from the Latin root passio, which means “to suffer.”
To be passionate is to find something that brings you great joy, but also that you are willing to suffer for. The suffering isn’t so much in doing the thing (which should be fun) but in how you make yourself vulnerable.
It’s safer to stay on the sidelines.
To talk about the thing. To think about the thing. To dream about the thing.
But none of those come close to doing the thing. And it’s doing the thing that enlarges your life and fills it with meaning and texture.
Even if it’s hard.
Even if you may fail.
Even if it’s not forever.
It's one of the most beautiful things about humanity to me, the way we want to want things. Striving and suffering for a purpose bring so much meaning. It seems like it should be more motivating for things to be easier, but it sure doesn't seem to work that way in practice.
Athletes dying twice is the line that will travel, and it holds for anyone whose craft is done alongside other people. The operating room has always been the place where things make sense to me, and the surgical team knows the details of my life in a way that sometimes feels more intimate than people I see socially. None of that survives leaving the room. You cannot take it with you, and the version of you that only exists inside it stops existing. That is worth knowing in advance and it is still not a reason to hold anything back.